THE STRAIGHT
DOPE:
Having spent a few
seasons on my high school football team (mostly on
the bench, thank you very
much) I thought I knew about the highs of
victory and the lows of
defeat. But our games were sparsely attended
and
never covered by any
media. The Massillon Tigers, on the other hand,
grace the front page of
their local newspaper and often draw over ten
thousand fans per game.
Kenneth Carlson's Go Tigers! follows the
team through one
controversial season but in its attempts to show the
incredible effect the
team has on the local population it also exposes
some of the darkness lurking in smalltown
America.

Massillon, Ohio, seems to
have nothing going for it. No one praises the
town for anything other
than its football team. Having won the state
championship numerous
times, the team is considered a pillar of the
community. Locals sport
the team colors on everything including
tattoos,
face-paint, and coffins.
The players are treated like near-celebrities
and the games are hotly
anticipated.

But a number of factors
put the game into a different light. One of the
most surprising sequences
shows a parentally-organized post-win party
featuring the high school
students drinking incredible amounts of beer
and, in one unbelievable
case, vomiting about thirty gallons of puke
all over the floor. The film reserves judgement,
which is good, but it
is so worshipful in other instances that the scene
plays more like a
humorous endorsement. Frankly, these parents should
be in jail.

Another sequence details
the disturbingly common practice of holding back promising
athletes for an extra
year in 8th grade to give them an advantage of
age
and size when they join
the high school team. How can it be that the adults involved - parents, school administrators, coaches - don't see anything wrong with this? The team also vehemently
denies illegally
recruiting one player from a neighboring high school
but given the disgusting
behavior of the team in other aspects there
is
no reason to believe
their protestations here.

Couple this sort of thing
with the total disregard that the parents
have
for their kids'
educations (one mom practically brags that her
doomed-to-failure kid, a team captain,
will get no help from her preparing for the SAT)
and the fact that the
town, for all their bragging about living and
breathing football
basically abandon their team at the first sign of
defeat, and you get a
pretty disgraceful portrait of a subculture. When
one motivational speaker
compares the day of a big game to the Jewish
holiday of Passover
(which celebrates freedom from centuries of
slavery)
he reveals the ignorance
that so many of his neighbors seem to have
internalized. No one in
the film has any sense of perspective, save a
couple of "outcast"
students who want nothing more than to get the heck
out of Massillon.

Go Tigers! takes
pains to not be overly judgmental. The
Moby-scored games are
edited for maximum drama and many of the more
telling statements are
allowed to pass. Carlson never dwells on any
topic for too long, which
is a clean way to avoid controversy. (Plus he barely
mentions the
blatent racial weirdness in the town.) It feels
like a more
serious-minded piece could really explore the truth
behind
the scenes of Massillon's obsession. For example,
when the wrangler of the team mascot, a tiger
cub named Obie, states
that the current Obie is their thirtieth in as
many years no one thinks
to ask what happened to the other twenty-nine. Are
there abandoned
tigers roaming the streets of Massillon or is the
destiny of the town's
beloved mascot messier than that? Wouldn't want to
find out
that our precious Tigers are anything less
than perfect, would we?

VIDEO:
Disappointingly, Go
Tigers!, which was shot on video, isn't
presented here in the
film print that IFC Films showed in theaters. The
video-to-video transfer
makes Go Tigers! look like a moderately
well shot home movie. The
picture is sharp but totally anonymous and
lacking drama. It is non-anamorphic widescreen.

AUDIO:
The packaging incorrectly
states the sound as Dolby Digital 5.1. It is
actually 2.0, and a weak,
muddy mix at that.

EXTRAS:Go Tigers! features a number of special
features. An interview
with NFL player and Massillon alumnus Chris Spielman
that was not used
in the film is here, as are a number of deleted
scenes. A complete 1951
newsreel on the Tigers that's glimpsed at the
beginning of the film is
included in its entirety, as is a where-are-they-now
update. Trailers
and additional music are also included along with
bios and other
informational screens. None of the extras are really
that exciting and
they don't really add what the film is lacking.

FINAL
THOUGHTS:Go Tigers! isn't a
very in-depth documentary. It partially opens
a number of cans full of
worms that it isn't quite prepared to fully
explore. The packaging
compares Go Tigers! to the landmark
basketball documentary
Hoop Dreams, which followed two inner
city
kids through every aspect
of their lives for five years. The makers of
Go Tigers! didn't
make that kind of commitment and subsequently
don't get nearly as far
below the surface. A really good documentary gets
inside its subject
and
examines every aspect of it with a critical eye.
Go Tigers!
opens
a lot of drawers but often only takes the slightest
peek inside, where
something like Hoop Dreams, a film that
wallowed in the kinds of
complexities that Go Tigers! avoids, is
willing to get its hands
dirty. Hoop Dreams is
Gone With the Wind.
Go Tigers! is an episode of
Dateline.